


friendship is the breathing rose

by wintervioleteye (hawkguyed)



Series: welcome to the occupation [1]
Category: Covert Affairs, The Avengers (2012), Young Avengers
Genre: BFFs forever, Blind Clint, Covert Affairs AU, Gen, Hey new girl, M/M, Phil is in the military still, Post DADT-repeal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:04:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkguyed/pseuds/wintervioleteye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate Bishop is the new girl at the DPD. Clint is the friendly but blind tech. That's not all there is to it though. (Covert Affairs AU).</p>
            </blockquote>





	friendship is the breathing rose

**Author's Note:**

> This started out when I stared at the Covert Affairs AU prompt. This isn't a fill of the prompt actually, because Tasha seems more like the 'run DPD with an iron fist' rather than 'new girl fumbling her way around'. So it spawned not just this, but a whole series involving a good handful of the Avengers in Covert Affairs verse. 
> 
> Title comes from a Oliver Wendell Holmes quote ('But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.').
> 
> Once again, thank you [lucdarling](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lucdarling) for beta-ing!

Katherine Elizabeth Bishop gets promoted to field agent before she completes her stint at The Farm. She's still young then, naive and fresh from having her heart broken when she steps foot into the underground lair of the DPD.

The first person who greets her is Clinton Francis Barton.

Military intelligence, he says as he sticks out a hand, and Kate is surprised to feel the firm grip and hardened calluses. He doesn't seem like the desk job type with his wide-set shoulders and rugged features, and she slowly comes to learn that there’s musculature hidden under those long sleeves and oversized hoodies. He smiles most days, but it never really reaches his eyes and there is something bitter under all that, something that speaks of loss and grief and anger that's buried deep under the lighthearted jokes and cocky grins.

She learns that he had lost his sight on an op gone wrong many months ago, and before that, Clint was the best marksman the US Army ever had.

Kate asks him for shooting lessons. She’d never completed the firearms course in The Farm, and she’s getting a little tired of being shot at all the time. Clint agrees. He teaches her how to hold a gun, how to hold a rifle, and it remains a marvel how he manages to disassemble a gun even though he can't see. (Then he challenges her to put it back together, and laughs when she fumbles her way through it.)

They end up working together for months, slipping into a routine of cheerful banter and mock-insults. Clint's a chatter bug on the radio most days, and it keeps the silence at bay when she gets sent out on fieldwork. She keeps a steady flow of coffee in his office in return, eventually installing a coffee machine with Braille labels in his office. The smile Clint gives her when she guides his hands over the buttons is worth the trouble of finding someone who could custom make something like that.

The smile still doesn't reach his eyes, and Kate realizes that there's little she can do about it.

Three months later, Kate gets over her ex-boyfriend Eli, the FBI agent who had left her on a beach one fine morning in Jamaica, after she shoots him in the shoulder. (He had been a liability, a loose tongue and it's all business, no hard feelings). It's a weight off her heart, and that's when she finally admits to herself that she finds Clint attractive. But on the day Kate considers asking him to dinner, Clint's met at the door to the parking garage by a man clad in army fatigues, his week-old stubble giving him a rough, barely out of the battlefield look. There's still dust on the 160th patch on his shoulder, bandages on his knuckles and a half-healed scratch on his cheek.

So Kate hangs back, hides out of sight (not that Clint can see her) and listens to the soldier murmur Clint's name. A smile that Kate hasn’t seen before takes years off the intelligence officer's features as the men interlace fingers, walking to a Hummer parked at the far end of the lot. Kate can’t read their lips as they wander off into the darkness or see any further hint of intimacy as they slip inside the vehicle, but it's in the way Clint stands that tells the secret of how much the soldier means to him.

The next day, Clint catches hold of her arm as she walks past his desk and smiles in the direction of where Kate is standing. It crinkles the corners of those blue-grey eyes, and speaks volumes to her even without Clint saying a word.

"His name is Phil." Clint looks as if he's on the verge of laughing, and she's pretty sure he must know she'd seen them the night before. "You should meet him instead of hiding behind the door."

Kate flushes because she hadn't expected Clint to know, but the man is definitely sharper than he lets on even if he's blind. He chuckles at her silence, returning to calmly to tap away at the keyboard with an infuriatingly smug grin on his face as she mumbles something about needing to run some details at her desk and flees.


End file.
